Fanfarlo

Charles Baudelaire

Translated by Edward K. Kaplan

“This portrait of the poet as a young dandy is full of wit and beauty, lightly underscored by cynicism… a charmingly self-parodic portrait.” —Natasha Tripney, The Observer

Ten years before Baudelaire published his masterpiece, The Flowers of Evil, the great poet penned the only prose fiction of his career: La Fanfarlo. The novella describes the torrid real-life affair the poet had with Jean Duval, a dancer whose beauty and sexuality Baudelaire came to obsess over. The outcome is a work of raw emotional power and a clear distillation of the Parisian’s poetic genius. As Baudelaire himself said, “Always be a poet, even in prose.”

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CHARLES BAUDELAIRE (1821–1867) was one of the founding and most influential poets of modern literature. His masterpiece, The Flowers of Evil, is known for its keen psychological insight into the dark side of human nature.